Almost forgot – today feels more like the last day of a seven day weekend than the start of a normal one.

This one is for Stewart, one of the snugglies who was here for Christmas. He’s four years old, has red hair and big doe eyes, and this is his favorite song. We sang it Wednesday night – we sang it for quite a while, over and over. And over.

Even though The Weavers recorded it earlier (in the 50’s), this 60’s version from The Tokens was the one playing whenever we took to the dance floor.

I have dry skin and go through rather expensive moisturizers far too fast. (You needed to know that, didn’t you!)

Now, I hate waste – absolutely hate it and using as much of the skin stuff as I do, I’ve learned a few things:

When your tube or pump bottle of moisturizer stops producing, don’t toss it out! There’s a good deal left that you can’t see, but not enough to respond to the pump or the press – which I assume to be by design. More sales that way! Don’t fall for it – get out the matte knife and cut that sucker open. Cover it with a little plastic wrap to keep it from drying out and you’ll get weeks more use.

Most of us know that it’s best to apply moisturizer after showering when skin is still a bit damp. It’s better absorbed that way, better for your skin – the bonus is you’ll use a lot less. And if you – like me – rub cream or lotion onto your hands a dozen times a day, the same principle applies. You’ll find you use about 1/3 the lotion you now use.

Product in a jar is honest. You can see what’s left and easily use every single bit. Reward those who put their cream in an honest jar. Buy it.

You may already be familiar with Americans Elect, the group working to put an internet-nominated presidential candidate on the ballot in 50 states. Just visited there to see what names have been submitted to date.

U.S. Receives Record Demand For Its Bonds Under Obama, Helping The Deficit | Bloomberg News reports that the U.S. government received record demand for its bonds in 2011, “pushing longer-maturity treasuries to their best performance since 1995 in a sign that President Obama may have little difficulty” financing the budget deficit. The European debt crisis is driving investors to buy U.S. assets, allowing the government to get an “all-time high bid-to-cover ratio of 9.07 for $30 billion of four-week bills it auctioned on Dec. 20 even though they pay zero interest.” Despite the GOP’s factually-challenged fear-mongering about the deficit, the high demand for U.S. bonds are “helping to contain borrowing costs and making it cheaper as a percentage of gross domestic product to finance deficits than when the nation last had budget surpluses.”

As the Islamists of 1979 were overthrowing their government, Jimmy Carter opened the door to a terrified Shah, citing ‘legitimate medical reasons’. There was political pressure from the Right to do so as Iran had been a US client state since our CIA (with the Brits) overthrew the last democratically elected Iranian government in 1953.

It went so well that irate Iranian students stormed the US Embassy in Tehran and took 52 Americans hostage, holding them for 444 days.

Now the president of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, is being admitted – for ‘legitimate medical reasons’. (The link doesn’t confirm that the decision has been made, but The NY Times says it’s a done deal.)

As Peter, Paul and Mary asked so many years ago, “When will we ever learn, when will we ever learn?”.

. . . that, for the second year, the War on Christmas has been called off because the soldiers failed to show up, which left poor Bill O’Reilly starved of targets. Anyway, those of you who did stand at the ready, you may now return home. Nice try.

Today is the Winter Solstice, so let us have a moment of solidarity with our early brethren across the history of humankind. In pre-history, this day was full of mystery and magic, a reminder of the unknown. There was fear in that, so they banished the darkness with light – beginning a tradition of a season of celebration and light, one we observe still.

Several times a day what I read in the news makes me want to throw up, but this sentence on MSN took me way beyond the dry heaves to something I can only call brainpuke, the involuntary expulsion of ideas so vile that they and sanity cannot be retained by the mind simultaneously. Here we see the media in action, already manufacturing the “Iraq War” that will be inscribed in the history books:

President Barack Obama meets Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki Monday, marking America’s exit from a war launched in a aerial “shock and awe” assault that went on to deeply wound both nations.

The notion of some sort of equivalence or mutuality of suffering between Iraq and the United States–some kind of shared pain experienced by both sides in this war, or even that it can be called a “war”: it was an invasion and occupation, on a false pretext, and it laid waste to a nation that had done nothing to ours; almost 5000 US soldiers dead, compared to between 100,000 and a million Iraqis; millions of internal and external refugees, infrastructure ravaged, cities reduced to rubble, children playing in streets strewn with depleted uranium, civil society extinguished, civil war continuing to rage–should be beyond the conceivable and the civilized; yet it’s what we need to believe and so we do, safely ensconced in our sense of moral certitude.

Despite the media hoopla and the Obama administration’s braggadocio surrounding the troop exit from Iraq, the US planned to maintain troops in the country indefinitely. The only reason for the withdrawal is that the Iraqi government refused to grant future immunity to US troops.

It was a slick move by Maliki, and demonstrates Obama’s lack of negotiating skills, even when he’s holding the big stick. He should have asked George W. Bush for advice.

In any event, only a neocon could be unhappy with the outcome: US troops out of Iraq.

The main Sunni political party is now boycotting the cabinet and accuses Shia Prime Minister Nouri Maliki of “monopolizing power”.

Meanwhile Danny Schechter reports, “Maliki has dipped into Saddam’s playbook by deploying his own secret police and military to round up hundreds of former Baathist supporters…A US think-tank documenting his crackdown is saying that Maliki is primarily concerned with his own survival.” Sort of like, uh, Saddam Hussein. And, like Saddam, “he too uses his son, Ahmad, to evict US firms from the Green Zone in Baghdad and do his father’s forceful bidding. And human rights groups are criticizing him for running secret jails, imprisoning journalists and critics, and firing 100 professors from a university in Saddam’s old hometown of Tikrit.”

Schecter continues, “With Maliki now terrorizing his own enemies, often in the name of questionable “plots” to overthrow him, Iraq will remain volatile. Bear in mind that after all these years, the Iraqis are still suffering from a broken electricity system as well as serious food and medical shortages.”

The English language took a terrible blow today when it lost its finest practitioner. There haven’t been many like Christoper Hitchens – even across centuries – who, during a journey from working class to Oxford to Trotskyite to American to war supporter, enriched the body of liberal and secular literature and thought with unique and eloquent passion. With words.

“I personally want to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive,” he wrote, “and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me.”

And there he articulates what I’ve always hoped for myself, but haven’t been able to articulate. I hear others say they want to die quickly, perhaps in sleep, ‘suddenly’ (as we say when it’s unexpected).

Not me. I want to know, I want to ponder but mostly I want to experience it and say goodbye to my world, my life. Like Hitchens.

Linda Holmes at NPR’s website had some fun yesterday, inventing 20 ficitonal commenters and their comments. They’re right on. Here are her “20 Unhappiest People You Meet in the Comments Sections of End of the Year Lists”:

1. The Poisoned. “The fact that you included Adele on this list of 100 things you like makes it a total joke.”

2. The Really Pretty Sure Person, Who Is Really Pretty Sure. “I’ve never seen Game Of Thrones, but I’m really pretty sure it’s not as good as Boardwalk Empire.”

3. The Person Who Is Exactly Right. “It really seems like this list of things you thought were good is just your opinion.”

4. The Surprisingly Lucid Narcoleptic. “ZZZZZZZZZ” is the classic. “SNORE” and “YAWN” are acceptable variants.

5. The Mother Of Tim “Freckles” Matterley. “There is a musician in Ann Arbor named Tim Matterley who is better than all these songs! You would like his music. He has a web site at FrecklesMatterley.com, and you can get his songs free on your computer! Please check out Tim Matterley, who does not have a big record contract YET but is very very good!!!!” Two comments later, she will often come back. “Also, Tim Matterley is in this YouTube video where he plays ‘Imagine’ at a children hospital. I am just one fan but I think he is great and he will go far!!!”

Oh, the things I subject myself to . . . Greta Vam Sustren interviewed Mr. Limbaugh of Palm Beach last night. I’m listening now: in the first half, the Greta asked a single question and Limbaugh talked for 27 uninterrupted minutes (who else, besides a President, gets half an hour without commercials)?

Another ten minutes in, and Greta has managed to ask two entire questions — an easy interview for her, no prep necessary. Aha! Now, at last we have our first commercial.

I won’t bother with the final minutes – I think I’ve got the take-away down:

Flash! the Democrat Party (not Democratic, their actual name, because an insult is intended) and the mainstream media are the cause of every ill this nation has suffered since WWII, as well as the reason marriage rates are down despite his own valiant effort to prop the numbers up.